The quantum revolution Mike Lazaridis expects is grand enough. Inventing the mythical quantum computer, which the BlackBerry billionaire has set as the primary goal of his massive investment in the southern Ontario technology hub known as Quantum Valley, could create a trillion-dollar market that Canada stands to dominate. He says the question is when, not if. The scientists say years, not decades.

But this is just the part he thinks he can predict.

“There is a quantum revolution coming, an industrial revolution,” he said. “It’s audacious.”

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Just as the challenge of a transcontinental phone call led to the invention of the transistor, and thus electronics and computing, he thinks quantum can do for Canada what silicon did for America.

Mr. Lazaridis founded the Perimeter Institute here in 1999 to develop theory, then the Institute for Quantum Computing in 2002 to do experiments, and now Quantum Valley Investments in 2013 to bring the science to market, now a decade ahead of schedule.

“Maybe we’ll find the quantum equivalent of a catalyst [a chemical agent that speeds reactions, useful in industry], that allows us to grow material,” he said. “What if you could make metals transparent?” Or suppose you could grow diamond, among the hardest materials known, as indeed researchers are doing — slowly, atom by atom — in a lab near his office on the northern campus of the University of Waterloo.

“How would that change architecture?” he said. “How would that change bridge production?”

“A bridge of diamond,” he says, nodding to affirm the dream. “This is verging on science fiction and what I’m going to tell you is, even this is probably not crazy enough … In a sense [investing in quantum] was a bet, because you’re betting against the prevailing culture, the prevailing idea, the prevailing attitudes.”

Now, with progress, his quantum bet, measured in hundreds of millions, looks more like an investment.

“What you’re looking for is exponential growth,” he said. “Linear growth is boring. Anything you can predict is linear. What you really want is, you want to think about, well, you want to hope that no matter how wild your thinking is, it’s not wild enough.”

He said he is comfortable in this realm of uncertainty, putting a fortune on technology that has not been invented yet, barely dreamed, if at all.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “That’s the best part … The most boring thing in the world would be if we did all these experiments and we got nothing new, we just verified everything we predicted.”

“It’s more of an expectancy, as opposed to an uncertainty. The uncertainty is only in the sense that we just don’t know. But the expectancy is that it will be better than we can predict,” he said.

As the most mystical science, quantum mechanics is just the place for such visionary questing.

It arose a century ago from the discovery that, on the ultra-small scale of the atom, energy does not increase smoothly, but rather by little jumps, known as quanta. Wild results followed, including the strange properties of entanglement, which is parodied in the fable of Schroedinger’s Cat (who is both dead and alive); and superposition, in which one particle can be in many states at the same time, both up and down, here and there.

This is possible because on the level of the single electron, matter looks less like ordinary stuff, and more like a web of probabilities, in which everything is more or less potential. Odd as it seems even to those who understand the math, particles at this scale act as waves, and vice versa. And nothing lasts very long, which represents one of the most daunting threats to Mr. Lazaridis’ grand vision, technically known as the problem of decoherence.

Basically, quantum computers fall apart the second you build them.

A quantum computer, in theory, is a device that calculates with qubits. A qubit is a physical system — sometimes etched into a chip of metal cooled to near absolute zero, or a gas held in place by a magnetic field, or even floating free in a liquid — that can be in multiple quantum states at the same time, known as superposition.

A computer of this sort could vastly exceed the power of classical computers, whose transistor bits are either on or off, one or zero, which places physical limits on the scope of their calculation.

But qubits are notoriously tricky to maintain. A team from Simon Fraser University, for example, got top billing last month in Science, a leading journal, for creating a single functioning room temperature qubit that lasted 39 minutes.

Something has to give before such things can come to wide use, but the promise is huge. A quantum computer of just 30 qubits would exceed what classical computers can accurately model.

IQC executive director Raymond Laflamme — the quantum scientist Mr. Lazaridis lured away from Los Alamos National Laboratory, famed in physics for his influence on the thinking of his teacher at Cambridge University, Stephen Hawking — predicts that within a few years his team will have built a true quantum computer of 50 to 100 qubits.

He holds out a single qubit in the palm of his hand, a little wafer of etched aluminum-coated silicon. Beaming with pride, he offers another, a little piece of diamond created in his lab, with a deliberate imperfection — a qubit — built into its “rigid and perfect” structure of pure carbon.

Control these things on a large scale, he said, and the world will change, no less than when fire was tamed, or steam, or electricity.

He is skeptical of the claims of D-Wave, a British Columbia company that sold what it calls the world’s first quantum computer to Google and Lockheed Martin. Prof. Laflamme compared it to an opaque “black box,” and has been asking whether it behaves any differently, or even any faster, than a classical computer. “And nobody can give me the answer,” he said.

In any event, it represents just one of many current strategies in the global race, in which Canada is a favourite. Prof. Laflamme lists them, wondrously named widgets like atom traps, ion traps, and quantum dots.

As is obvious from a tour this week of the University of Waterloo’s Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum Nano Centre — a slick new building with high-tech clean rooms, ultra-sensitive optical equipment, cooling fridges that can approach absolute zero, and even a freestanding deep concrete foundation to eliminate natural tremors — Prof. Laflamme and his colleagues are tantalizingly close to a revolutionary breakthrough, but nothing has quite taken off.

Here in Quantum Valley, they are gathered for the dawn, but the horizon is still dark.

Commercial applications, though rare, are slow to take shape. First is quantum cryptography, according to Steve MacLean, the astronaut and laser scientist who stepped down as head of the Canadian Space Agency to join IQC as an associate faculty member this year.

For example, in the parking lot of an IQC building on the edge of campus, a prototype satellite tracking device, the size of a toaster, lies under a tarp in the bed of a pickup truck, which drives around to test its reception. It is part of a security system, in which two quantum particles will be “entangled,” then beamed via satellite to different ends of the Earth, such that measuring one will instantly affect the other, so they become keys to literally uncrackable codes.

After that it will be quantum sensing, Mr. MacLean said, especially in medical imaging, exploiting the inherent fragility of quantum states to detect cancer, for example. Only later will the quantum computer, the grail at the end of this historic quest, ever be fully grasped.

By then, it might be all around us — in everyday technology like thermostats, personal computers, phones.

“My bet is that all these devices will be improved by going to the size of atoms and manipulating the quantum mechanics there.” said Prof. Laflamme. “I think they’ll be everywhere.”

“We will eat them,” he said, not as food, but medicine.

With such bold speculation from a scientist, it is easy to see why Mr. Lazaridis thinks, in hindsight, all our modern technology — even the BlackBerry that made so much of this financially possible — is going to look quaint.

“The important part is to realize that it wasn’t any different [a century ago]. Everyone then thought it couldn’t get any better,” Mr. Lazaridis said. “Everyone was amazed with the state of the art, you know. They had hot and cold running water, and an icebox. Maybe a few years later they had a radio. And life couldn’t get any better, right? And yet it did.”